the life of Alexander-the Letters of Alexander to Aristotle from India and the Wonders of the East —were also made, and brought with them the air and the scenery of a new world. They are put into excellent English-the last fine English of the times before the Conquest, the last fruit, with the exception of the Chronicle, of the tree which Ælfred had planted; and which, when it grew again above the soil, bore so changed an aspect that its original planters would not have recognised it. Its roots were the same; its branches and foliage were different. Ælfred would have been puzzled to read the English in which the Ancren Riwle (the Rule of Anchoresses) was written in the reign of Henry III. It was the first Middle English Prose.

The English of the Chronicle illustrates this transition. The Chronicle is the continuous record of English history in English prose, and it passes undisturbed through the Norman Conquest up to the death of Stephen. Its Winchester Annals practically cease in 1005, or even earlier. They were preserved in Canterbury from 1005 to 1070, but there are only eleven entries during these sixtyfive years, and these were made after the Conquest, at the election of Lanfranc as archbishop. The rest of these Annals is written in Latin, and they end with the consecration of Anselm. What Winchester dropped Worcester continued. The Worcester Annals were carefully kept to the year 1079.

If they were continued to 1107, that continuation was merged in the Annals of Peterborough. The Worcester Annals of the Chronicle are written in the English of Ælfric, and were probably done by Bishop Wulfstan, who held the see from 1062 to 1095, and by Colman, his chaplain, who wrote the bishop's life in English.

The Peterborough Annals were only fully edited after the rebuilding of the monastery in 1121. This fine and full edition of the Chronicle was made up out of the Annals of Winchester, Worcester, and Abingdon, and was then continued probably by one hand to the year 1131. Another hand, using a more modern English, carried it on from 1132 to 1154, when it closed with the accession of Henry II. The records at Worcester and Peterborough are not unworthy of the first records at Winchester. The Wars of Harold and the Fight at Stamford Bridge are boldly and picturesquely written. Even more picturesque is the account another writer gives of Senlac, and of William's stark, cruel, and just rule. This writer had lived at William's court, and we trace in his finer historical form that he had studied the Norman historians. The Peterborough scribe who followed him is rather a romantic than a national historian, and loves his monastery more than his nation. The second scribe of Peterborough, who probably composed his work in 1150-54, is well-known for his pitiful and patriotic account of the miseries of England under the oppression of the Norman nobles. When in 1154 the Chronicle was closed, the Norman chroniclers took up the history of

29

England and wrote it in Latin; but the English Chronicle remains for English literature the most ancient and venerable monument of English prose.

After the Conquest.

The Norman Conquest put an end to Old English literature. When that literature arose again its language and its spirit were transformed. Old English had become Middle English. Its prose, which was religious, had been profoundly changed by the Norman theology and the Norman enthusiasm for a religious life. Its poetry, equally touched by the Anglo-Norman religion and love of romance, adopted as its own the romantic tales, melodies, manners, and ways of thinking which came to it from France, both in religious and in story-telling poetry. But this change took nearly a century and a half before it began

to bear fruit. During those long years of transition little English work was done, and none of it could be called literature. Old English writings, such as the Homilies of Ælfric and the Translations of the Gospels made in the eleventh century, and now called the Hatton Gospels, were copied and modernised. Monasteries, remote from Norman interests, still clung to, and made their little manuals and service books in, the English tongue. English prose was just kept alive, but only like a man in catalepsy.

English poetry had a livelier existence; but we have no remains of the songs which were sung throughout the country, and which kept alive in the soul of franklin, peasant, and outlaw the glories and heroes of the past. We know that these were made and sung from the Norman chroniclers who used them, and from suggestions of them in the Brut of Layamon. Lays were made after the Conquest of the great deeds of Hereward, and are used in the Latin life of that partisan. Even in the twelfth century, songs were built on the old sagas, such as those which celebrated Weland and Wade, his father; and sagas like Horn, Havelok, Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, and Waltheof, which took original form in English in the thirteenth century, existed as popular lays in the eleventh and twelfth. The noble figure of Ælfred appears again in the poem entitled the Proverbs of Alfred, an ethical poem of sententious sayings, varying forms of which arose in the twelfth century.

Old English poetry, having neither rhyme nor a fixed number of syllables, depended on accent and alliteration. Every verse was divided into two halfverses by a pause, and had four accented syllables, the number of unaccented syllables being indifferent; and the two half-verses were linked together by alliteration. The two accented syllables of the first half and one of the accented syllables of the second half began with the same consonant, or with vowels which were generally different from one

another. But often there was only one alliterative letter in the first half-verse; and the metre was further varied by the addition of unaccented syllables. The lays made after the Conquest illustrate the transition from the old alliterative metre to the short line and rhyme which were soon established by the Anglo-Normans when they began to write in English. The Poema Morale (of which an account will be found below, with specimens, at

page 40) is thought by some to have first taken shape early in the twelfth century. In that case, it and other twelfth-century poems of little account bring us still nearer to Middle English poetry, if they do not form part of it; but it is best, when we speak of literature, to make Middle English poetry properly begin with the first noble piece of poetic literature, with the Brut of Layamon, at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

STOPFORD A. BROOKE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The MS. of Beowulf is in the Cottonian Library in the British Museum, and Judith is in the same MS. The Exeter Book is in the library of Exeter Cathedral, and was placed there by Bishop Leofric in 1071. It contains the Riddles, the Elegies, the Crist, the St Guthlac, the Phænix, the Juliana, the Widsith, the Complaint of Deor, and other poems. It is a kind of anthology. The Vercelli Book, found at Vercelli in 1822, contains, interspersed among homilies, the Andreas, the Fates of the Apostles, the Dream of the Rood, the Elene, and two unimportant poems. The Junian MS. of the so-called Cædmonian poems is in the Bodleian. The Fight at Finnsburg was found on the cover of a MS. of Homilies at Lambeth, Waldhere on two vellum leaves at Copenhagen; the Battle of Brunanburh is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the Battle of Maldon in a copy of the original MS. made by Hearne. Only one MS. of each of these poems exists.

Of Elfred's translations we have many MSS.-three of the Cura Pastoralis, five of Bada's History, two of the Orosius, two of the De Consolatione, four of the Laws. The Soliloquia are in the MS. containing Beowulf. Of Elfric's works there are many MSS. Seven MSS. of the English Chronicle exist. MS. A, the Parker MS. written at Winchester, is at Cambridge; MS. B is at the British Museum, and was made at Canterbury; MS. C is at the British Museum, and is an Abingdon MS.; MS. D, also at the Museum, is the Worcester Chronicle; MS. E, now at the Bodleian (the Laud MS.), was done at Peterborough; MS. F, at the British Museum, was probably kept at Canterbury; MS. G, also probably kept at Canterbury, is at the British Museum, and is likely to be a copy of MS. A.

[When Modern English was beginning to show its full powers in the hands of the early Elizabethan writers, the oldest stage of the tongue was almost forgotten, save for the little knowledge required by those whose business it was to spell out and interpret Anglo-Saxon charters and the like. At the Reformation AngloSaxon religious literature was looked up for controversial purposes; Archbishop Parker gathered and edited MSS., and greatly promoted Saxon' studies. Verstegen shows he knew some AngloSaxon in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (1606); and Spelman was driven to make his Glossarium (Part I. 1626) by the difficulties he met in studying our oldest laws. Francis Junius, or Du Jon, a Continental Protestant who settled in England in 1621, devoted himself to the study of Anglo-Saxon and the cognate Teutonic tongues, edited the so-called Cadmon and other Old English books, and gave his name to the Junian MS. Hickes, the nonjuring bishop, published the first edition of his Anglo-Saxon and Maso-Gothic Grammar in 1689; and all students of early English history owe a debt of gratitude to Thomas Hearne, who studied and preserved antiquities.' Percy in his Reliques takes no cognis ance of the oldest poetry. Warton's History of English Poetry (vol. i. 1774) professedly begins with the close of the tenth century; but what he says by way of introduction on the three successive 'dialects of Saxon-British Saxon (till the Danish occupation),

Danish Saxon ('British Saxon corrupted by the Danes'), and Nor man Saxon (Danish Saxon adulterated with French')-shows how far he was to seek in this field; the spurious Cædmon's beautiful poetical paraphrase of the Book of Genesis' he names as written in Danish Saxon. Gray's knowledge of Icelandic and his interest in Welsh poetry and in 'Ossian' make it certain that, had he carried out his projected History of Poetry, the section on what he called 'the introduction of the poetry of the Goths into these islands by the Saxons and Danes' would have received fuller attention than heretofore. Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts (first of many editions, 1783) does not include this period within its scope. The first edition of Ellis's Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790) has nothing earlier than Surrey and Wyatt; but the 1801 edition gives not only Middle English poems, but the old song of Brunanburh, with a literal translation, and the ingenious rendering made by Hookham Frere, when an Eton schoolboy, into Rowley

like fourteenth-century English. In the notes Ellis accepts for Anglo-Saxon words derivations from Chaldaic' and Latin as unhesitatingly as from Gothic.' Rask the Dane put the study on a sounder philological footing by his Grammar (1817), which Thorpe translated; and the works of Thorpe, Bosworth, and Kemble in the first half of the century revived in the English people interest in their old language and literature. Conybeare's Specimens of Anglo-Saxon Poetry appeared in 1826. Campbell begins his Specimens of the British Poets (7 vols. 1819) with Chaucer and the King's Quair; and in the earlier issues and reprints of this Cyclopædia (1844-74) Anglo-Saxon literature was dismissed in less than three pages.

For further study the reader may be referred to English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest (1898), by the writer of the preceding section of this work, Dr Stopford A. Brooke, or to his History of Early English Literature (2 vols. 1892), which describes and appreciates still more fully the whole of the Anglo-Saxon literature down to the accession of Alfred; to Professor Earle's little handbook (1884); to Wülker's Grundriss der Angelsächsischen Litteratur (1885); to the first volume of Ten Brink's History of English Literature (1877; transl. 1887); to the relevant parts of Professor Henry Morley's First Sketch, English Writers, and Library of English Literature, of Jusserand's History of the Literature of the English People (1896; transl. 1895), of Taine's History of English Literature (1863-64; transl. 1871), and of Wülker's Englische Litteraturgeschichte (1896); to Grein's Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Prosa und Poesie, as re-edited by Wülker (1881-97); to the American Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (3 vols. 1883-88); to Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Readers, and Zupitza's; to the Grammar by Sievers, and Bosworth's Dictionary as edited by Toller. A bibliography giving the editions and translations of the various Anglo-Saxon works will be found in Dr. Stopford Brookes English Literature to the Conquest: thus there are five or six English editions of Beowulf, and as many translations, including the verse translation by William Morris.-ED.]

proved not merely a unifying but a quickening influence. The note of our island patriotism is struck by Robert of Gloucester in the opening lines of his Metrical Chronicle :

England is a well good land, I ween of lands the best,
Set at the one end of the world, all in the west.
The sea goeth it all about, it stands as in an isle ;
Of foes they need the less them doubt, but it be through
guile.1

The purely dynastic and predatory objects of the Hundred Years' War with France did not foster this spirit, and it is not until after the Armada- or perhaps, if we are to look carefully for its first notes, after the great rupture with' Rome earlier in the sixteenth century-that patriotism becomes a force in English poetry. But the negative influence of the new conception was potent. Old English history and traditions soon ceased to interest our poets, the use of the forms of Old English poetry gradually died out, and English writers took their inspiration more and more from foreign sources. Welsh legends, French romances and miracle-plays; French allegory and love poetry; the stories of Troy and Thebes, of Theseus and Alexander, as filtered through Latin and Romance versions; the masterpieces of Virgil and Ovid; Eastern tales brought home by the Crusaders; lastly, the splendid new literature of Italy-these were the quickening influences in English literature from the days of Layamon till a new tide of foreign-born ideas began a fresh epoch in the sixteenth century. The blood which ran in the veins of the singers was, in the main, English, and to this we owe that continuityperhaps, rather, that continual recurrence-of the Old English temper and way of thinking which constitutes a real unity amid the striking differences of our literature at different periods. But just as the English race assimilated Briton, Dane, and Norman, modified itself thereby, and yet remained English, so our English literature now, in all appearance, breaks wholly with its own past, in order to take to itself these foreign traditions, forms, and ideals, and yet never ceases to maintain its own individuality.

For us now it is easy to see that the gain which the Norman Conquest brought to English literature more than counterbalanced the loss. But for generations not merely our old litera

1 England his a wel god lond, ich wene ech londe best,
I-set in the on ende of the worlde as al in the west.
The see geth him al aboute, he stond as in an yle;
Of fon hii dorre the lasse doute, bote hit be thorgh gyle.
(Cotton text, ed. Wright.)

ture, but the English speech itself, seemed in danger of extinction, and the loss of this would have been irreparable. To the reality of this danger the evidence of contemporaries is strikingly explicit. Himself the author of a long rhyming chronicle in English, and writing about a century after English imaginative literature had made its new start in Layamon's Brut, Robert of Gloucester gives this account of the relative positions of the French and English languages at the end of the thirteenth century. He has been describing the submission of the Londoners to William the Conqueror, and proceeds:

And thus came England into the Normans' hand, And the Normans could speak then but their own speech,

And spake French as they did at home, and their children so did teach.

So that high men of this land, that of their blood come,
Hold all to that same speech that they of them nome. took
For but a man know French men count of him lute;
But low men hold to English and to their own speech
yute.

little

I ween that there be in all the world countries none
That hold not to their own speech save England alone.
But well men wot that to know both well it is,
For the more that a man knows the more worth he is. 2
(Lines 7537-7547.)

yet

Robert of Gloucester wrote his Chronicle, probably, soon after 1297, and if we rely implicitly on written testimony, the popularity of French must have gone on increasing during the next fifty years.

Writing in Cheshire about 1350, Ranulph Higden tells us that the English, who had always had three forms of speech, Northern, Midland, and Southern, owing to the different German races from which they had sprung, had had their native language further corrupted by contact with Danes and Normans.

This corruption, he goes on, has made great progress in our own times from two causes, because boys at school, contrary to the usage of all other nations, from the first coming of the Normans are obliged, leaving their own vulgar tongue, to translate [their Latin] into French; also because the children of the nobles from their first baby talk are trained to the

2 Thus com, lo! Engelond into Normandies hond,

& the Normans ne couthe speke tho bote hor owe speche,

& speke French as hii dude atom & hor children dude also
teche.

So that heiemen of this lond that of hor blod come,
Holdeth alle thulke speche that hii of hom nome.
Vor bote a man conne Frenss me telth of him lute;
Ac lowe men holdeth to Engliss & to hor owe speche yute.
Ich wene ther ne beth in al the world contreyes none,
That ne holdeth to hor owe speche bote Engelond one.
Ac wel me wot vor to conne bothe wel it is,
Vor the more that a mon can the more wurthe he is.

French idiom. Desiring to resemble the nobles, that they may thus seem of greater consequence, the country people use every endeavour to talk French. In this way, to a surprising degree, the natural and proper speech of Englishmen, though confined in a single island, has become diverse in its very pronunciation, while the Norman speech, coming from abroad, remains very much the same with every one. As to this aforesaid threefold Saxon speech, which has with difficulty still survived among a few rustic folk, the east-countrymen agree more closely with the west (as living in the same latitude) than do northerners with southerners.'1

John Trevisa, who translated the Polychronicon, when he came to this passage in 1385, interpolated the comment that after the Black Death of 1348 John Cornwall (whose name deserves to be honoured) caused his pupils to translate their Latin into English instead of French, and that the change had become general, also gentilmen haveth now moche i-left for to teche here children frensche.' It is quite plain, however, that the whole passage in the Polychronicon is both carelessly written and exaggerated. Higden, who seems to have been a very aristocratic monk, is clearly speaking all the time of well-to-do people, ignoring the great bulk of the population beneath them. But even if we stretch a point and make his 'rurales homines' and 'pauci agrestes' refer to people of the franklin class, it is plain that he was a bad observer. In 1362, within a dozen years or so of his writing the Polychronicon, the citizens of London prevailed on Edward III. to allow their suits in the law-courts to be pleaded in English instead of French; in the same year Langland was writing his first draft of his famous Vision; seven years later Chaucer was at work on his first original poem, the Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse. By 1370 English had definitely triumphed over French, and the stream of English literature, original as well as translated, which flows steadily from

1 Hæc quidem nativæ linguæ corruptio provenit hodie multum ex duobus: quod videlicet pueri in scholis, contra morem cæterarum nationum, a primo Normannorum adventu, derelicto proprio vulgari, construere gallice compelluntur: item, quod filii nobilium ab ipsis cunabulorum crepundiis ad gallicum idioma informantur. Quibus profecto rurales homines assimilari volentes, ut per hoc spectabiliores videantur, francigenare satagunt omni nisu. Ubi nempe mirandum videtur quomodo nativa et propria Anglorum lingua, in unica insula coartata, pronunciatione ipsa sit tam diversa, cum tamen Normannica lingua, quæ adventitia est, univoca maneat penes cunctos. De prædicta quoque lingua Saxonica tripartita, quæ in paucis adhuc agrestibus vix remansit, orientales cum occiduis tanquam sub eodem coli climate lineati, plus consonant in sermone quam boreales cum austrinis.-Polychronicon, Book I. ch. lix.

Robert of Gloucester onwards shows that English cannot have been in any serious danger at any time after the reign of Henry III. Nevertheless, we must not forget that as late as 1320 or 1330 a preaching friar like Nicholas Bozon thought it well to write popular sermons for English audiences in French, and that as late as the reign of Richard II. the excellent Gower sought immortality as a poet in French and Latin as well as in the language with which Chaucer was content. Clearly French continued to be much spoken as a fashionable and polite language til nearly the end of the fourteenth century, and we may remember that in the miracle-plays great persons, like Herod and Pilate, often begin their speeches in it.

During the period when the English language was still little used by cultivated people there was no lack of literary production in England. The bulk of this was written in Latin, and alike for its quantity, its variety, and the talent displayed in it, the Latin literature of England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is very remarkable. In history within less than fifty years we have the Chronicon ex Chronicis of Florence of Worcester (d. 1118); the Historia Novorum and Vita Anselmi of Eadmer of Canterbury (d. 1124); the Historia de Gestis Anglorum of Simeon of Durham (d. 1130); the De Gestis Regum Anglorum (449-1120), Historia Novella (a continuation to the year 1143), the De Gestis Pontificum Anglorum, Life of Aldhelm, and treatise on the antiquities of Glastonbury, all by William of Malmesbury; the Historica Ecclesiastica of Ordericus Vitalis (c. 1142); and the Historia Anglorum of Henry of Huntingdon, which is brought down to the year 1154. Geoffrey of Monmouth's imaginative history of the kings of Britain (Historia Regum Britannia), to which we shall refer again, seems to have acted as a discouragement to sober chroniclers; but towards the end of the century we have the works of the Welshman Gerald de Bary (Giraldus Cambrensis) on Ireland and Wales, and the Historia Rerum Anglicarum of William of Newbury (1198). The Annals of Roger de Hoveden end with the year 1201, the Chronicle of Roger of Wendover in 1235; while in his Historia Major, Historia Minor, and Lives of the Abbots of St Albans, Matthew Paris (d. 1259) glorified the office of history-writer to St Albans Abbey, which had been created before 1183, and which produced a series of chronicles extending over more than